Authors: Russell Blake
Fifteen kilograms of C-4 exploded in a blinding fireball, sending shockwaves through the hull of the
Lilliana
when the tender and its passengers vaporized. Chunks of the shore boat pelted the cruise ship’s steel plating as the roar of the blast carried to the deck, where another contingent of Ukrainian military was signing off on the captain’s documentation in preparation for the vessel’s departure.
Two hours later, a previously unknown faction of the pro-Russian insurgents issued a statement claiming responsibility for the atrocity, which had taken the lives of seventy-three tourists, five crewmen, three soldiers, and the pilot of the hapless tender. The statement warned that there would be more attacks on foreign-flagged vessels unless the Ukrainian administration immediately stood down and abandoned its claims of being the nation’s legitimate government. Horrified international reaction to the atrocity was immediate, while the Russians insisted they had no part in the terrorist action and joined with the international community in condemning it.
The U.S. and the European Union dismissed the Russian statement as a ruse to distance itself from the reprehensible behavior of its cohorts, and announced that a new set of harsh sanctions would be enacted to punish the Russians for their barbaric aggression. An op-ed piece in one of the U.S.’s premier papers called for American troops to be sent to help battle the new terrorist threat that had surfaced on Russia’s southern border, and the German chancellor announced that the actions of the insurgents would be considered to be actions of Russia, in spite of that country’s insistence that it had no relationship with the new group.
Tour companies cancelled all visitations to the region, and lawsuits were filed on behalf of the dead passengers within hours of the disaster, claiming that the cruise line had been negligent in protecting them and had risked the lives of everyone aboard by choosing to stop in Odessa.
Tensions mounted as the rhetoric grew more heated, until the threat level of nuclear war escalated to the highest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis – a development that would have been considered impossible only a few years earlier, with the Soviet Union a faint memory and the specter of nuclear Armageddon an archaic footnote in mankind’s foolhardy history.
One week ago, 110 miles NE of Sangba, Central African Republic
Two Toyota Land Cruisers and four Hilux trucks, their green and beige camouflage paint slathered with red mud, bounced down a rutted jungle track, a long shower having turned the ordinarily terrible road virtually impassable. The engines labored as the four-wheel-drive vehicles slipped and slid on their way east, toward the no-man’s land that was officially national forest but was in reality rebel territory on the border of Sudan. The truck beds were full of heavily armed soldiers with resigned expressions and uniforms sopping from sweat and the last of the rain.
The ragged convoy had left the military outpost south of the little village of Bamingui two hours earlier and was behind schedule, the downpour having slowed its progress to a crawl. Their destination was a remote airstrip still another eighty miles away, and the face of the lead vehicle’s driver twisted in frustration at the slop the vehicles were fighting through. A radio crackled to life on the seat beside him, and the captain in the passenger seat reached for it with his free hand, the other gripping a battered AK-47.
“Osprey, this is Henri. Do you copy?” a deep baritone voice asked in French, an artifact of the French and Belgian colonization that many of the nation’s historians argued had amounted to slave labor for those countries’ mining efforts during the last century.
“
Oui
, Henri.”
“Your transponder shows you haven’t made much progress,” Henri said accusingly.
“The road is a disaster. We’re lucky we’ve gotten this far, sir.”
“Your rendezvous wants confirmation of when you’ll make it.”
Claude, a captain in the armed forces and the leader of the unofficial task force code-named Osprey, checked his watch. “Figure two hours late. Maybe three.”
“It will be getting dark. He’s afraid that if it takes too long, he won’t be able to take off.”
“Worst case, we can park along the airstrip with our lights on so he can see the runway.”
“Anything you can do to speed things up?”
The front axle struck a particularly ugly rut, and Claude’s head almost hit the roof of the Land Cruiser. The driver’s arm muscles bulged with strain as he manhandled the big SUV around a slippery bend, and the ground firmed as the terrain rose in a gentle slope. Claude was framing a neutral answer when the surrounding jungle exploded with gunfire, and high-velocity assault rifle rounds thwacked into the wet earth around the rolling procession.
The driver floored the gas, and Claude returned fire as the Toyota accelerated like a runaway train, the other vehicles doing their best to keep up as the soldiers in the truck beds opened up on the shooters. Slugs thumped into the truck behind Claude’s SUV, and three of the soldiers screamed in agony as they were cut down by crossfire. Claude continued to squeeze off disciplined bursts as the two soldiers in the rear of the Land Cruiser did the same, ignoring the salvo of rounds that peppered the cargo area of the SUV.
One of the men grunted and looked down at his abdomen with an expression of surprise: a red stain spread through fingers slick with blood with each pulse of his heart. Claude ejected his spent magazine and was slapping another into place when a blast from the track just ahead rocked the vehicle, causing the driver to momentarily lose control as he fought the wheel.
“Damn. RPG. That was close,” the driver growled through clenched teeth. Sweat streamed freely down his face, but his eyes never left the road.
“Get us out of here,” Claude ordered, and began shooting again, painfully aware that the odds were against them, what with the terrible road conditions and their assailants hidden by the dense jungle.
The motor revved as the driver downshifted. Both he and Claude flinched when a slug punched through the rear window, and the unwounded soldier’s head vaporized in a cloud of red emulsion, splattering them both along with the inside of the windshield. The man’s lifeless finger locked onto the trigger of his assault rifle and emptied through the sheet metal roof as Claude continued firing at the invisible attackers.
The last Hilux’s big Browning M2 .50-caliber machine gun opened up on the area from which most of the shooting was emanating. A standing soldier was operating the weapon as his companions laid down cover, and the staccato boom of the large-caliber rounds was deafening. With a rate of fire of over six hundred rounds per minute, it spewed a hail of death into the trees, and the shooting at the convoy eased.
Claude’s driver goosed the accelerator as the knobby tires found purchase and rounded the bend, trailed by the remainder of the column, two of the Hiluxes lost as smoldering casualties of the ambush back on the muddy trail and the surviving soldiers were quickly cut down by the attacking force. An RPG detonated behind the final truck but missed by a safe margin, and then the column was clear of the gunfire, back in the still of the jungle.
Claude twisted to survey the carnage in the rear seat. Both soldiers lay twisted unnaturally as the Toyota bounced along, and the muggy interior of the SUV stank of blood and death. The driver glanced at the rearview mirror and shook his head.
“We lost half our men,” he said, wiping away a fleck of blood from his cheek. No stranger to combat, his voice was calm, if tight.
Claude nodded as he reloaded his weapon, his ears ringing from the gunfire, and reached for the radio.
He relayed a terse report. When he was done, Henri’s voice was ominously quiet. “There had to have been a leak. And your cargo?”
The driver and Claude exchanged a look. Claude turned to study a small wooden crate in the back of the SUV and then replied into the radio, “Safe.”
“I’ll see about getting a helicopter into the air to clean up after you,” Henri said. “I’d hoped to keep from attracting attention, but it’s too late now.”
Claude gave him the coordinates of the ambush and signed off. Whether or not Henri followed through, the important thing was that they’d made it past the worst their attackers could throw at them and were still alive; and with their precious charge intact.
The driver tapped the dashboard with a finger as thick as a cigar. “Something’s wrong. We’re losing power.”
“Damn.” Claude’s brow furrowed as the driver waited for instruction. “Keep going. Let’s get some distance before we check the damage.”
The driver nodded, and then the rear window blew out in a shower of glass as more rifle fire hit the Land Cruiser. Claude ducked down and was already firing out the ruined window. The SUV behind them slowed as rounds tore through the doors, and it careened off the track and crashed into a tree, leaving only the two remaining Hiluxes on the trail. Spent brass shell casings streamed from Claude’s weapon as he fired blindly into the underbrush, his face grim. The driver gunned the engine and the vehicle rounded another turn, leaving the gunfire behind.
Claude’s eyes drifted to the speedometer, and then he leaned into the rear seat and retrieved one of the dead soldiers’ rifles, along with four full magazines. The driver redlined the tachometer, ignoring the danger that high speed on the treacherous trail presented, and pulled away from the two trucks, their four-cylinder engines no match for the Land Cruiser’s V-8.
Two minutes later the SUV lurched to a stop in a clearing, and Claude leapt from the passenger side to survey the exterior of the vehicle. The driver joined him, and after a quick inspection of the underside of the bullet-ridden conveyance, they spotted a thin stream of fluid darkening the ground below. Claude kept watch, weapon in hand, as the driver slid in the mud beneath the SUV for a closer look. The Hiluxes rolled to a halt behind them, and Claude walked toward the trucks as the driver worked. He counted the soldiers at a glance: nine men remaining, plus the two drivers. They’d started off with thirty, and of the nine survivors, three were wounded.
He listened for signs of pursuit but heard nothing from down the trail. He approached the first truck and held a hushed conversation with the driver, and then moved to the second and did the same.
Upon his return, his eyes locked with his driver’s.
“Well?” he asked.
“Stray clipped one of the lines. I wrapped it with duct tape. Should hold for a few hours, but we’ll need a real repair sooner than later,” the driver said, his eyes roaming the surroundings as he spoke.
Claude retrieved the radio and gave Henri the bad news. Henri’s response was immediate. “Transfer the cargo into one of the trucks. Toss a grenade into the disabled SUV so it can’t be used to follow you. Getting to the airstrip is still the top priority.”
The crate barely fit behind the passenger seat of the lead Hilux, and as Claude climbed into the cab after brushing the remnants of the destroyed windshield from the seat, he wondered at the number of lives that had been lost to protect the seemingly insignificant container. The ferocity of the attack, as well as the number of shooters involved, had shocked him. He was accustomed to skirmishes with rebel forces in the area, but this had been more on the scale of an all-or-nothing battle.
There was no question that information about their mission had been leaked.
Now his only hope was that the attackers had expended all their efforts at the ambush point and didn’t have the means to hit again on the way to the airstrip. The likelihood was low – there were no roads nearby other than the laughable strip of brown stretching into the distance – but he couldn’t depend on the rebels’ ineptness. The attack had nearly succeeded, and the rocket-propelled grenades had almost turned the tide.
He looked to the truck driver and grunted an order. The driver of the Land Cruiser lobbed a grenade into the interior of the SUV and scrambled into the truck bed. The Hiluxes were twenty yards away when the grenade detonated, sending what was left of the vehicle hurtling through the air. Claude didn’t look back, his AK clutched tightly to his chest; all his attention was focused on the road ahead and the gray sky peeking through the canopy, threatening further rain.
Five days ago, Dmitrov, Moscow, Russia
A stiff breeze rustled the treetops along Zagorskaya Boulevard as the sun sank into the distant horizon, leaving bleak silhouettes of Soviet-era apartment blocks outlined against a salmon sky. Couples meandered hand in hand along the wide thoroughfare, carved wooden statues from a nearby park watching like silent guards. The growl of a diesel motor echoed off the road as an overloaded bus lumbered from the direction of the railyard, belching black clouds as it transported tired workers home, their lives little changed from when they had toiled on behalf of a Communist apparatus.
Smoke stacks thrust heavenward from the darkened masses of factories near residential neighborhoods with cancer rates six times the national average. The square shape of an ancient Lada Vaz-2101 sedan turned onto the boulevard. Its onetime blue exterior was now faded to a gunmetal gray that matched the pavement, and its fenders and doors were eroded from road salt and the elements. The driver switched on the weak headlights as dusk approached and drove with caution into the city’s industrial area, a section that the recent gentrification of the metropolis had ignored.
Inside the car, a woman in her thirties watched the buildings go by, her lips compressed into a thin line. The driver, a portly bearded man wearing a multicolored sweater several decades out of fashion, gripped the wheel with whitened knuckles, his eyes concentrating on the road as brake lights flashed their warning of a stalled van ahead. The woman checked her watch – a cheap Chinese model made from black plastic – and exhaled impatiently.
“This is taking forever,” she hissed angrily.
“Don’t worry. We’re not that late,” the driver reassured her. He glanced at the leather satchel by her feet. “The others are right behind us.”